Friday, 29 January 2016

Elevated temperatures from use of seawater as coolant by large coastal installations can be seen in high resolution thermal imagery.

Note that the SSTs in this image are not quantitatively correct. The image is based on LandSat8 and the thermal channels unfortunately have calibration issues that prevent quantitative water surface temperature determination. However, it is interesting to look qualitatively at the data, since it is at ~100 m resolution the in infrared bands, and resolves features like this that are not seen in 1 km data typically used for SST.

EDF UK are offering a student summer paid internship for a project working with me to scope the potential in principal for thermal remote sensing at high resolution to help in monitoring and understanding the physical and ecological impacts of coolant plumes from power stations around the UK.

It would be excellent to have well calibrated multi-channel thermal resolution observations at ~100 m scale resolution for applications like this and also remote sensing of lakes. It is good that there is interest around Europe in extending the capabilities of future Sentinel 2 missions in this direction.